Seagate is done making 7200rpm 2.5-inch pure hard disk drives

There's just not much call for the form factor with SSDs on the rise.

Anandtech is carrying the news (sourced from X-Bit Labs) that Seagate will be ceasing production of three of its four Momentus 7200RPM disks: the Momentus 7200.4, Momentus 7200.2, and the Momentus Thin 7200. The company will continue to manufacture slower 5400rpm drives, but the 7200rpm format makes less and less sense with the availability of hybrid drives, SSD-backed caches, and actual SSDs.

We've written a lot on how SSDs work, and their dominance of the laptop space seems assured at this point. 7200rpm drives are offered by just about every laptop OEM as a performance upgrade over cheap-and-slow 5400rpm drives and full SSDs, but the incentive for consumers to choose them versus a small SSD-based cache (like Intel's SRT) is rapidly eroding. A small SSD cache typically doesn't add that much cost to a laptop, but the performance boost for most workloads will be much greater than upping a spinning disk's rotational speed from 5400 to 7200rpm.

Caching aside, SSDs themselves are rapidly eclipsing spinning disks in the mobile market, whether in the traditional 2.5-inch form factor or the newer mSATA "stick" format. Most consumers foregoing an SSD for a spinning disk on a laptop are seeking the lowest possible cost on their hardware, and that means 7200rpm 2.5-inch drives don't really fit into very many buyers' plans anymore. An "as cheap as possible" laptop buyer would want a 5400rpm drive; anyone with even a slight inclination toward performance would choose a caching solution, a hybrid drive, or a full SSD over the tiny incremental improvement of a 7200rpm drive.

Inside a Momentus XT hybrid drive.

Seagate

Even though Seagate is ditching all of its 7200rpm "pure" hard disk drives, the company is still focusing on performance with its hybrid Momentus XT product line, which marries a 7200rpm platter with a chunk of NAND flash and uses the NAND as an extended disk cache. However, Seagate's lack of consumer SSDs puts it in an awkward position of not having a really pretty girl to bring to the SSD dance—you sell the technology you have to sell, and Seagate will obviously be pushing hybrid hard disk drives in the near future as a less-expensive performance option for people focused on value. The performance isn't that spectacular, though: previous Momentus XT drives just aren't very fast.

Seagate could get itself an SSD without too much effort, however. Back in January, we spoke with representatives from LSI/Sandforce at CES, and one of the things the Sandforce representatives touted about their SSD controllers was how OEMs could easily construct their own SSD solutions around them. Of course, shortly after this a representative from Samsung pointed out that not controlling the entire controller/NAND supply in a disk's manufacturing can lead to integration issues, especially as NAND is only getting smaller and potentially more fiddly.

I keep waiting for Seagate to buy up or partner with an existing OEM and start releasing their own SSD's, but there don't seem to be a lot of companies that seem to be open for acquisition. Maybe OCZ, but their reputation is so shitty, it would be a terrible PR move, even if they were to implement some respectable sort of QA on the products.

Also, still bummed that 2TB 3.5" drives are still at a higher price than they were 2 years ago. Yay for lack of competition.

anyone with even a slight inclination toward performance would choose a caching solution, a hybrid drive, or a full SSD over the tiny incremental improvement of a 7200rpm drive.

Going from 5400 to 7200 makes a major difference in system responsiveness, especially when hitting the drive heavily. 5400 rpm units are just really draggy and slow. If you've got enough RAM in a Windows system, it can hide that fairly well, but laptops with lots of RAM usually have expensive drives as well.

SSDs are a lot faster, but the difference from 5400 to 7200rpm is not tiny.

anyone with even a slight inclination toward performance would choose a caching solution, a hybrid drive, or a full SSD over the tiny incremental improvement of a 7200rpm drive.

Going from 5400 to 7200 makes a major difference in system responsiveness, especially when hitting the drive heavily. 5400 rpm units are just really draggy and slow. If you've got enough RAM in a Windows system, it can hide that fairly well, but laptops with lots of RAM usually have expensive drives as well.

SSDs are a lot faster, but the difference from 5400 to 7200rpm is not tiny.

I would even say it's night and day. I replaced a 5400rpm drive in my Macbook with a 7200 RPM Momentus XT hybrid drive and it was the difference between walking through mud and sprinting on a paved road. In particular, VM's in VMWare Fusion can now run without crippling the entire system.

The benefit of the SSD cache doesn't show up well in most benchmarks, but it really does help quite a bit with "the snappy". Commonly used OS files get read from the cache and the "feel" of the machine can improve quite noticeably. At 17 cents/GB or so, the 750GB XT remains a pretty interesting value proposition IMHO.

Anyone at this point who only installs an SSD drive for both system and data files is silly. HDDs are still just as relevant today as they were before SSDs became an option and to be honest I giggled a little about chopping the 7200rpm but keeping the slower drives. Why maintain production of the slower (inferior) alternative at the expense of eliminating the faster (superior) product.

anyone with even a slight inclination toward performance would choose a caching solution, a hybrid drive, or a full SSD over the tiny incremental improvement of a 7200rpm drive.

Going from 5400 to 7200 makes a major difference in system responsiveness, especially when hitting the drive heavily. 5400 rpm units are just really draggy and slow. If you've got enough RAM in a Windows system, it can hide that fairly well, but laptops with lots of RAM usually have expensive drives as well.

SSDs are a lot faster, but the difference from 5400 to 7200rpm is not tiny.

I would even say it's night and day. I replaced a 5400rpm drive in my Macbook with a 7200 RPM Momentus XT hybrid drive and it was the difference between walking through mud and sprinting on a paved road. In particular, VM's in VMWare Fusion can now run without crippling the entire system.

The Momentus XT is a hybrid drive. It includes a SSD cache. So comparing it against a 5400 RPM drive and drawing conclusions about 7200 RPM drives is rather silly.

I'm a bit disappointed at the lack of progress, capacity-wise. I bought 1 3TB HD a while ago (and its backup)... and when that got filled up, I could find nothing but another 3TB HD, 2 yrs later. I was hopping to at least get that in the much more convenient 2.5" factor, but those top out a 2TB for an outrageous price, though anything 1TB and below costs the same in 3.5" or 2.5" format.

Seagate's move surprises me as I would expect the 2.5" format to have a much brighter future than 3.5". Cutting models from 2.5" seems to go counter-current.

Anyone at this point who only installs an SSD drive for both system and data files is silly. HDDs are still just as relevant today as they were before SSDs became an option and to be honest I giggled a little about chopping the 7200rpm but keeping the slower drives. Why maintain production of the slower (inferior) alternative at the expense of eliminating the faster (superior) product.

Probably because the 'superior' product costs more to make and doesn't justify the price premium when compared to hybrid drives.

I think that a better way to look at it is that the new line of hybrid drives (they expanded that recently) replaces the older 7200 rpm drives for the high-end HDD, while the bargain bin drives stay at 5400 rpm as before.

I know the hybrids don't test well, but IME, they make an appreciable difference in everyday use - even for the first gen models that only have a 4GB read cache. I know that the newest line of hybrids are bigger - does anyone know if Seagate ever got the write caching to work as well?

anyone with even a slight inclination toward performance would choose a caching solution, a hybrid drive, or a full SSD over the tiny incremental improvement of a 7200rpm drive.

Going from 5400 to 7200 makes a major difference in system responsiveness, especially when hitting the drive heavily. 5400 rpm units are just really draggy and slow. If you've got enough RAM in a Windows system, it can hide that fairly well, but laptops with lots of RAM usually have expensive drives as well.

SSDs are a lot faster, but the difference from 5400 to 7200rpm is not tiny.

Another factor in weighing 5400 vs. 7200 in laptops, though, is battery life. Fast disks can eat power quickly. Ideally, users should carefully evaluate the tradeoffs in making that decision.

Magnetic media isn't going away any time soon, and 5400 RPM is unacceptably slow for people with legacy hardware but reasonable performance needs or goals. NAS devices; home servers; SOHO/SMB file, web, and mail servers, and so on. Losing 7200 RPM, and with both larger SSDs and 10000 RPM hard drives priced out of certain markets, well, that's gonna suck. There are other vendors, certainly, and that's where such consumers will go. Of course, that market will shrink, eventually, but that's a ways off yet. They'd better step up the hybrid game ASAP, and step down those prices, or they'll be losing some business.

Also, still bummed that 2TB 3.5" drives are still at a higher price than they were 2 years ago. Yay for lack of competition.

Whilst the duopoly doesn't help, isn't that more to do with the huge flooding that occurred. I can imagine it still being a factor this far on.

Its entirely duopoly that has had that effect, the effects of the flooding were over reported, in other words they recovered awhile ago and just choose to keep the prices where they are at.

ColinABQ wrote:

Magnetic media isn't going away any time soon, and 5400 RPM is unacceptably slow for people with legacy hardware but reasonable performance needs or goals. NAS devices; home servers; SOHO/SMB file, web, and mail servers, and so on. Losing 7200 RPM, and with both larger SSDs and 10000 RPM hard drives priced out of certain markets, well, that's gonna suck. There are other vendors, certainly, and that's where such consumers will go. Of course, that market will shrink, eventually, but that's a ways off yet. They'd better step up the hybrid game ASAP, and step down those prices, or they'll be losing some business.

Like you I think magnetic media will be around for awhile now. Something that has been around for over 30 years just doesn't die because of something like SSD. Besides there is something to be said about lifespan of this media itself, we have a general idea of how long a working magnetic drive will work, we really don't know how long the data on a working SSD device will last there just isn't enough data.

Here is the future. Huge magnetic disks with cache sizes of a significant size of their total space, even more then today's hybrid disk, were talking about mini-SSD disks built into 10-20TB drives.

If they expand their Momentus XT line (hybrid 7200 RPM drive with a small SSD) then the consumer loses nothing. The Momentus XT line offers even better performance over 7200 RPM drives. If they can cut the 7200 RPM's and increase the sales volume of the XT line then they should be able to drive down the costs of the XT line while simultaneously offering an advantage over competitors' 7200 RPM drives. It would be beneficial to the consumer, and beneficial to Seagate.

This will only be a big deal in a bad way if Seagate cuts the 7200 RPM drives and doesn't adjust the range and prices of the Momentus XT line.

anyone with even a slight inclination toward performance would choose a caching solution, a hybrid drive, or a full SSD over the tiny incremental improvement of a 7200rpm drive.

Going from 5400 to 7200 makes a major difference in system responsiveness, especially when hitting the drive heavily. 5400 rpm units are just really draggy and slow. If you've got enough RAM in a Windows system, it can hide that fairly well, but laptops with lots of RAM usually have expensive drives as well.

SSDs are a lot faster, but the difference from 5400 to 7200rpm is not tiny.

I would even say it's night and day. I replaced a 5400rpm drive in my Macbook with a 7200 RPM Momentus XT hybrid drive and it was the difference between walking through mud and sprinting on a paved road. In particular, VM's in VMWare Fusion can now run without crippling the entire system.

The Momentus XT is a hybrid drive. It includes a SSD cache. So comparing it against a 5400 RPM drive and drawing conclusions about 7200 RPM drives is rather silly.

And if that 20gb of cache is storing a 30gb VM while in use that is mighty impressive.

I ran into an interesting problem with a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. I purchased a 2011 MBP with the standard hdd (a Toshiba 5400rpm), with the intention of immediately upgrading to the Momentus XT 750GB hybrid. So I purchased it from NewEgg and immediately set out to do my bazillionith drive swap.

No matter what I tried, the XT would not work in my machine. I called Apple support, brought it to the store, and looked on forums. Appears others have had similar issues, but nobody seems to know why. The drive installed flawlessly in my old ThinkPad T60p, and it installed very easily in my PS3 (where it sits today). But for the life of me, I couldn't get it working in my MBP.

I ended up throwing a WD Scorpio Black into the MBP, and it works great. I would happily use an SSD, but I need massive storage for work and school needs, so it wasn't practical at the time. Now I'm a little worried to try another upgrade, but will possibly give it another go, eventually.

Hopefully, Seagate can do something to address this (apparently random) issue. Macs are obviously still a small percentage of the market, but it would be nice to have some reliable hybrid options for high performance machines like the MBP. I suspect it's more an Apple issue than a Seagate issue. But whatever the case, it would be great to see it addressed.

From a business perspective, Lee hit the nail on the head. No reason to really bother making a standalone 7200rpm drive anymore, since those are focused on the higher end laptop market, and the costs of adding an SSD chip is negligible. Yay progress!

Summary, Seagate is now no longer producing Non-Hybrid 7200 RPM 2.5"drives, going forward the only 7200 RPM 2.5" drives being produced will be Hybrids. Platters that do not meet the requirement for 7200 RPM operation are used in normal Non-Hybrid 5400 RPM 2.5" drives if possible.

Fallacy, Seagate will no longer produce 7200 RPM 2.5" drives, they still do but they are Hybrids..

I think people complaining about 5400 disks for home NAS and VM's are full of horse manure.

A 5400rpm disk can saturate a gigabit connection for sequential reads (yeah, it sucks marginally more than a 7200 for 4k reads, but seriously, what do most people use a home NAS for? Let me answer -- Backups and media files).

And if you are seriously using VM's, then this is your profession/job, and you (or your company) can and should spend to upgrade to an SSD.

Hybrid drives have a future for laptops where the user wants for storage than an SSD can provide, even though Apple's Fusion and other software provides a similar functionality (as I type this from a Thinkpad with a 64GB mSATA and 750GB 5.4k HD).

I assume they're going to continue making the Constellation.2 series of Enterprise 2.5" 7200RPM drives since that's a much bigger and much more lucrative market than the fast shrinking consumer performance laptop HDD sector (seriously, who's worried about laptop performance and NOT using an SSD?).

The fact that budget laptops came with 7200RPM drives for a couple years and now have switched back to 5400's is a joke. The price difference for OEMs must be minute and is basically a positioning tactic to make buyers spend a couple hundred more on a (for a typical consumer) useless i5 processor, and an equally meaningless 6-to-8GB RAM increase. Why not ditch the 5400 and ramp the 7200 production back up--can't be worth more than a buck per unit...

I'm still interested in 2.5" hard drives to some extent - I have a 1 TB 2.5" drive as the storage drive alongside the SSD. Much quieter than a 3.5" HDD, and the 5400rpm speed does not really matter in a secondary HDD.

I do understand Seagate's point of view about 2.5" drives - it looks like there will be a 1 TB SSD available for a reasonable amount of money in the near future, meaning that SSD capacity will have caught up to laptop hard drives (I do know about the 2 TB 2.5" drives, but they are too thick for almost any laptop).

The only advantage left to spinning platters is price/capacity, and the 7200 rpm drives suffer from the same problem as the Velociraptors do - if you want performance and are willing to pay extra for it, why not just get an SSD?

This could be nice and all but I could care less on storage tech for a temporary amount of time. What I would really look forward is to f**** once and for all break the stupid mono(duo)polization of hdd prices jackups and bs'ness. Between Seagate and WD.

Hmm, am I missing something? IF I was going to be buying a 2.5 pure hard disk drive, why on earth would I want to buy a 5400 over a 7200? The price difference is negligible and generally the 7200's have more cache. All this will do is steer me away from Seagate in favor of another manufacturer who sells 7200's.

In fact, the last time I bought a 5400 hard drive was years ago. I never, ever look for anything lower than 7200RPM.

Hmm, am I missing something? IF I was going to be buying a 2.5 pure hard disk drive, why on earth would I want to buy a 5400 over a 7200? The price difference is negligible and generally the 7200's have more cache. All this will do is steer me away from Seagate in favor of another manufacturer who sells 7200's.

In fact, the last time I bought a 5400 hard drive was years ago. I never, ever look for anything lower than 7200RPM.

Power, noise, cost. If you're worried about performance SSD or a hybrid drive is the answer Seagate and the market are pitching. Basically there aren't enough customers left in the consumer space who want more performance than a high density 5400 drive can offer but aren't going to splurge for the SSD for it to be worth Seagate to keep making the 7200 drive without the hybrid cache.

I also hope the rest of the market (which is basically down to Western Digital) doesn't follow suit. SSDs just aren't there yet in terms of price and capacity and relegating systems that would have included 7200 RPM drives to 5400 would be a shame. The difference in system speed and responsiveness between the two speeds is substantial.

Seagate is making a foolish move, but its a move that doesn't surprise me. all this is is a money grab. What the headline should read is: Seagate is attempting to squeeze more money out of customers wanting higher performance.

From a production standpoint, it would make sense for seagate (or other manufacturers for that matter) to drop production of their 5400RPM drives. Its obvious that production wise it doesn't cost any more to make 5400PRM over 7200RPM by the fact that they there is no cost difference at the retail level.

Western Digital must be loving this, Seagate is abandoning an entire market and handing it to WD/HGST...

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.